The Last Serious Thing: Modernist Responses to the Bullfight. Foley, Lawrence The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/8903 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] The Last Serious Thing: Modernist Responses to the Bullfight Lawrence Foley Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 I, Lawrence Foley, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Date: 25th September 2014 2 Thesis abstract This thesis investigates the ways in which literary and artistic modernism interpreted the Spanish institution of the corrida, or the bullfight. The sheer volume of modernist intellectuals who engaged with the corrida is startling. From Joyce to Picasso, Stein to Hemingway, Leiris to Lawrence, the bullfight provided inspiration to so many of the writers and artists of canonical modernism. Indeed, the relevance of the corrida to modernist intellectuals is perhaps captured best by Michel Leiris’s lucid metaphor of the bullfight as a mirror revealing ‘certain dark parts of ourselves’. In other words, in addition to providing the content of literature of the early twentieth century, many of the writers we identify as modernist used the corrida in a metaphorical capacity too. In light of this, it seems significant that the peak of modern interest in the corrida occurred in the context of a cultural crisis in western civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus the key questions that this thesis seeks to address are as follows: why did the modernist gaze rest so intently upon the corrida? Why did so many European intellectuals cling to bullfighting and insist upon its enduring relevance given the apparent paradox between its own lack of adaptation to modern conditions and the very ‘newness’ that modernism championed? To what extent did the corrida act as a mirror to many of the cultural tensions problems addressed by modernism? How did modernism’s engagement with bullfighting, and the easy manner in which Hemingway’s body of work came to stand alone for that rich engagement, affect subsequent works that focussed on the bullring? These phenomena are examined in the context of the anomic cultural landscape of the era, taking into consideration the artistic, sexual and archaeological revolutions that informed and affected writers of the time. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Chapter One: “From the Labyrinth to the Bullring” 27 Chapter Two: “Bullfighters and Writers” 66 Chapter Three: “Bullfighting and the Aesthetics of Modernism” 106 Chapter Four: “Bullfighting After Modernism” 140 Conclusion 178 4 Acknowledgements Queen Mary, University of London generously funded the research informing this thesis, for which I am tremendously grateful. I received a travel grant from the Queen Mary Postgraduate Fund in support of a research trip to the Mailer and Hemingway archives at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Moreover, I must also give special thanks to the staff at this latter archive, whose expertise and patience were integral to the success of the trip and its importance to the research presented here. I could not have completed this thesis without the support and guidance of my supervisors, Professors Morag Shiach and Paul Hamilton. Their advice was always sage and their recommendations always thoughtful. Special mention must also be made of Professor Bill Schwarz and Dr. Suzanne Hobson, whose willingness to read and comment so helpfully on the work presented in these pages was beyond their professional obligations. Bill Schwarz, in particular, offered considerable advice in the inchoate stages of the project; I am indebted to him for expediting the formation of my research proposal. My friends have provided me with sound counsel and support throughout and have been more important than they could possibly know. From within Queen Mary, Niall Gildea and Emily Hogg were antidotes. From without, Oliver Wimborne, Seamus Biggins, Laura Tapsfield, Meredith Daniels, Kathryn Taussig, Benjamin Alcott, Kieron Limby, Megan Crisp and David Torrens have all been crucial in very different ways. Sonia Nootan had unerring faith when I didn’t, and her patience and empathy is without equal. My family have been a constant source of motivation during my academic career. My sister, Megan Crisp, and my nan, Shirley Foley, now know more about bullfighting than they ever thought they would. Finally, I must thank my parents, Margaret Foley and Philip Crisp, whose love and encouragement has sustained me throughout. This thesis is dedicated to them for all that they are and have been. 5 Introduction ‘Anything capable of arousing passion in its favour will surely raise as much passion against it.’1 - Ernest Hemingway ‘It is not a question of being a fan or disliking it[...]there is no choice but to elucidate it.’2 - Jose Ortega y Gasset The bullfight is a divisive spectacle, and this study examines the responses of individuals who, coincidentally, fall on both sides of that divide. In the reading and interpretation I offer here, I have always attempted (and, in my opinion, succeeded) to place my own personal feelings about the corrida aside. The purpose of this study is to consider the value of bullfighting to the existing understanding of certain branches of literary and visual modernisms, not to furnish the reader with a polemic from either side of a debate that is bigger than the study itself. Though what follows in the first half of this introduction is an autobiographical narration of my own encounter with bullfighting, it serves no other purpose than to provide a contextual framework for the genesis of this project. Making the decision to attend a bullfight is not easy; remaining in the arena to see it through is infinitely more difficult. Indeed, there are very few contemporary cultural practices more contentious than bullfighting – or as the Spanish term it, the corrida – and it is rare to encounter an unemotional, detached attitude towards it. In part, the violent nature of responses to bullfighting can be attributed to the semantic irony inherent in its name. After all, the bullfight – as it is termed in the English-speaking world – is not really a fight in any sense of the word. If what happens in the plaza de toros can be termed a fight, it is one which is rigged from the start. There is, realistically, no chance that the bull will emerge ‘victorious’ from the bullring. Even if, in the rare instances that it does occur, a matador received a serious or fatal goring, the chances are that the bull would still be slaughtered.3 Given the undeniable one-sidedness of the corrida, it is no surprise that the bullfight is such a contentious practice. Indeed, the corrida’s capacity to polarise opinion is remarkable; even in Spain, where the practice still holds much currency, opinion is vehemently divided on its enduring relevance. Beginning the project coincided with the banning of the practice in Catalonia in July 2010, in a move seemingly motivated both by its own separatist agenda and more specific concerns pertaining to animal welfare. 1 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 11. 2 José Ortega y Gasset, quoted in Rosario Cambria, ‘Bullfighting and the Intellectuals’, in Timothy Mitchell, Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 214. 3 Pardons for toros bravos do exist, but these are extremely rare. Often they are granted in response to the matador’s inability to dispatch it rather than in cases where the bull manages to cause significant physical damage to the matador. 6 The ban came into force on 1 January 2012, with the last bullfight having been held in the region in September of the preceding year. Within mainland Spain too, there is undoubtedly an increased internal hostility towards the corrida. This hostility is discernible in a number of ways: it is not uncommon to visit a bullring in any of Spain’s major bullfighting centres to find that the city’s bullring has been daubed in graffiti such as ‘homocida’ or ‘asesino’ [murderer]. Indeed, the growing ambivalence towards the practice is borne out in the statistics; in 2008 there were some 3,295 corridas held across the country, and by 2012 this figure had dropped to 1,997 – a plummet of over 40%.4 Notwithstanding the difficult economic conditions in which Spain found itself during that particular timespan, such a downward trend surely at least implies the distinct possibility that bullfighting might not last another century, nor even another fifty years.